"I've never been to Florida," Melanie says, looking a little glazed, even for her.
"You should give it a try," Charlie says. "It's where the real people are."
"You mean we're not real people?" Rabbit asks, egging him on, helping Janice out. This must hurt her. He takes a cashew between his molars and delicately cracks it, prolonging the bliss. That first fracture, in there with tongue and spit and teeth. He loves nuts. Clean eating, not like meat. In the Garden of Eden they ate nuts and fruit. Dry-roasted, the cashew bums a little. He prefers them salted, soaked in sodium, but got this kind in deference to Melanie; he's being brainwashed about chemicals. Still, some chemical must have entered into this dry-roasting too, there's nothing you can eat won't hurt you down here on earth. Janice must just hate this.
"It's not just all old people either," Charlie is telling Melanie. "You see plenty of young people down there too, just living in their skins. Gorgeous."
"Janice," Mrs. Springer says, pronouncing it Chaniss. "We should go on the porch and you should offer people drinks." To Charlie she says, "Melanie made a lovely fruit punch."
"How much gin can it absorb?" Charlie asks.
Harry loves this guy, even if he is putting the make on Melanie in front of Janice. On the porch, when they've settled on the aluminum furniture with their drinks and Janice is in the kitchen stirring at the dinner, he asks him, to show him off, "How'd you like Carter's energy speech?"
Charlie cocks his head toward the rosy-cheeked girl and says, "I thought it was pathetic. The man was right. I'm suffering from a crisis in confidence. In him."
Nobody laughs, except Harry. Charlie passes the ball. "What did you think of it, Mrs. Springer?"
The old lady, called onto the stage, smooths the cloth of her lap and looks down as if for crumbs. "He seems a well-intentioned Christian man, though Fred always used to say the Democrats were just a tool for the unions. Still and all. Some businessman in there might have a better idea what to do with the inflation."
"He is a businessman, Bessie," Harry says. "He grows peanuts. His warehouse down there grosses more than we do."
"I thought it was sad," Melanie unexpectedly says, leaning forward so her loose gypsyish blouse reveals cleavage, a tube of air between her braless breasts, "the way he said people for the first time think things are going to get worse instead of better."
"Sad if you're a chick like you," Charlie says. "For old crocks like us, things are going to get worse in any case."
"You believe that?" Harry asks, genuinely surprised. He sees his life as just beginning, on clear ground at last, now that he has a margin of resources, and the stifled terror that always made him restless has dulled down. He wants less. Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inner dwindling.
"I believe it, sure," Charlie says, "but what does this nice girl here believe? That the show's over? How can she?"
"I believe," Melanie begins. "Oh, I don't know – Bessie, help me."
Harry didn't know she calls the old lady by her first name. Took him years of living with her to work up to feeling easy about that, and it wasn't really until after one day he had accidentally walked in on her in her bathroom, Janice hogging theirs.
"Say what's on your mind," the old woman advises the younger. "Everybody else is."
The luminous orbs of Melanie's eyes scout their faces in a sweep that ends in an upward roll such as you see in images of saints. "I believe the things we're running out of we can learn to do without. I don't need electric carving knives and all that. I'm more upset about the snail darters and the whales than about iron ore and oil." She lingers on this last word, giving it two syllables, and stares at Harry. As if he's especially into oil. He decides what he resents about her is she seems always to be trying to hypnotize him. "I mean," she goes on, "as long as there are growing things, there's still a world with endless possibilities."
The hum beneath her words hangs in the darkening space of the porch. Alien. Moonraker.
"One big weed patch," Harry says. "Where the hell is Nelson, anyway?" He is irked, he figures, because this girl is out of this world and that makes his world feel small. He feels sexier even toward fat old Bessie. At least her voice has a lot of the county, a lot of his life, in it. That time he blundered into the bathroom he didn't see much; she shouted, sitting on the toilet with her skirt around her knees, and he heard her shout and hardly saw a thing, just a patch of flank as white as a butcher's marble counter.
Bessie answers him dolefully, "I believe he went out for a reason. Janice would know."
Janice comes to the doorway of the porch, looking snappy in her daisies and an orange apron. "He went off around six with Billy Fosnacht. They should have been back by now."
"Which car'd they take?"
"They had to take the Corona. You were at the liquor store with the Mustang."
"Oh great. What's Billy Fosnacht doing around anyway? Why isn't he in the volunteer army?" He feels like making a show, for Charlie and Melanie, of authority.
There is authority, too, in the way Janice is holding a wooden stirring spoon. She says, to the company in general, "They say he's doing very well. He's in his first year of dental school up somewhere in New England. He wants to be a, what do they call it -?"
"Ophthalmologist," Rabbit says.
"Endodontist."
"My God," is all Harry can say. Ten years ago, the night his house had burned, Billy had called his mother a bitch. He had seen Billy often since, all the years Nelson was at Mt. Judge High, but had never forgotten that, how Peggy had then slapped him, this little boy just thirteen years old, the marks of her fingers leaping up pink on the child's delicate cheek. Then he had called her a whore, Harry's jism warm inside her. Later that night Nelson had vowed to kill his father. You fucking asshole, you've let her die. I'll kill you. I'll kill you. Harry had put up his hands to fight. The misery of life. It has carried him away from the faces on the porch. In the silence he hears from afar a neighbor woman's hammer knocking. "How are Ollie and Peggy?" he asks, his voice rough even after clearing it. Billy's parents have dropped from his sight, as the Toyota business lifted him higher in the social scale.
"About the same," Janice says. "Ollie's still at the music store. They say Peggy's gotten into causes." She turns back to her stirring.
Charlie tells Melanie, "You should book yourself on a flight to Florida when you get fed up around here."
"What's with you and Florida?" Harry asks him loudly. "She says she comes from California and you keep pushing Florida at her. There's no connection."
Charlie pulls at his spiked pink punch and looks like a pathetic old guy, the skin pegged ever tighter to the planes of his skull. "We can make a connection."
Melanie calls toward the kitchen, ` "Janice, can I be of any help?"
"No dear, thanks; it's all but done. Is everybody starving? Does anybody else want their drink freshened?"
"Why not?" Harry asks, feeling reckless. This bunch isn't going to be fun, he'll have to make his fun inside. "How about you, Charlie?"
"Forget it, champ. One's my limit. The doctors tell me even that should be a no-no, in my condition." Of Melanie he asks, "How's your Kool-Aid holding up?"
"Don't call it Kool-Aid, that's rude," Harry says, pretending to joust. "I admire anybody of this generation who isn't polluting their system with pills and booze. Ever since Nelson got back, the sixpacks come and go in the fridge like, like coal down a chute." He feels he has said this before, recently.
"I'll get you some more," Melanie sings, and takes Charlie's glass, and Harry's too. She has no name for him, he notices. Nelson's father. Over the hill. Out of this world.
"Make mine weak," he tells her. "A g-and-t."